I climbed up after the farmer, navigating the thick bones of the wing, the climb getting steeper and steeper the higher I went. Finally, I fell down into the saddle, taking my place beside the farmer, in the second row behind the guardsmen.
I looked over Dothik on the back of an Elthika, at the crowd that had gathered. At the towering building of my home in the Market District and then down at my family.
Samryn, theKarath’s Elthika, flapped its wings. I noticed the other Elthika had given it a wide berth, clustered together away from the red dragon. Alaryk had already returned to his place on Samryn’s back, and he was looking atme.
I remembered the whisper of his voice in my mind and forced my gaze away, just in case he could wiggle his way inside through the brief connection.
He had heartstone magic—that much was clear. But I had bigger issues now. Because if he could let himself into the door of my mind, this had just made the mission all the more dangerous. I’d never given thought to what would happen to us if we werecaughtspying for theDothikkar.
Now I worried it would mean a certain death. Forallof us.
“Thryn’ar,” came Alaryk’s call, the word short and commanding. An order.
The Elthika below us vibrated with energy, like it was pulling it from the ground around it. I heard the farmer cry out beside me, huddling deeper into the side of the saddle, hands scrambling for purchase on anything as we catapulted into the air on dragonback.
The shimmering scales of the Elthika caught sunlight. I pressed my fingertips over the half wall of the saddle, to touch the plating of its side. Just likepyrokiscales—hard like metal, but flexible and shifting with its movements.
Familiar.
Halna was right. There was much to learn. Maybe we weren’t so different from one another. Our beasts certainly weren’t.
Behind me, I saw the stretch of Dothik, the tiny dots of people below, of everyone I’d ever loved made small and unrecognizable. The city sparkled, smoke rose from turrets, people milled in the markets.
Overhead, I heard a mighty roar. Samryn, bloodred, flew above us, taking the very tip of a flying formation.
Before us stretched the glimmer of Drukkar’s Sea.
And beyond that?
Karak.
Chapter 4
ALARYK
Samryn’s amusement strummed through the bond as he watched a Dakkari stumble down the wings of the Elthika.
“Amusement” with a heaping dose of derision. Samryn was a Vyrin, after all. An ancient. He could be impatient and temperamental because he’d lived long enough to run through his supply of patient understanding.
It was my duty to keep him tethered, and so I pressed my hand to the side of his wide jaw, a heaping huff falling from him, blowing back my hair. I sent a rebuke of my own, funneling it down the thread of my own magic.
“Because of the Dakkari, we have heartstones once more,” I reminded Samryn. His red gaze flicked to me. There was a strain there. Something he’d been trying to shield from me. I could feel it grow in conjunction with my own worry.Not again. “We should show…gratitude.”
Elthika could not understand our language. They had one all their own, which the Karag could not replicate. But Samryn and I were bonded beyond imagine…and so we communicated with shared emotion.
He shook off my rebuke, raising his head somy palm fell away, and made a chortled growl when a young Dakkari male took a topple to the ground.
“You’re impossible,” I murmured, trying to hide the way my own lips twitched. A feeling within me bloomed, one of annoyance, but it was my Elthika’s. “Very well. Sit here and enjoy the spectacle.”
Samryn’s smug satisfaction had me shaking my head as I walked away. The ground quaked behind me when he curled himself down onto the earth. I tried to shake the feeling of unease. I feared the sickness was returning. Samryn’s breathing had been labored during flight, but every time I’d tried to squeeze beyond the gap of our natural bond, he’d shut me out, an edged warning following the simmering rejection.
Though we were bonded and had been for years, Samryn was still an Elthika. I could not break his trust, and he deserved his privacy and my respect. Even if I was only trying to help the stubborn ancient.
Myzalla was instructing mykya’rassa—my rider horde—to be ready within the next hour for the final leg of the journey. There was a group of trusted riders from Sarroth—Sarkin’s territory—that would lead their Dakkari to its borders. This was our resting place, and then both groups would break away to their final destinations.
“Anything you want to add,Karath?” Myzalla asked me when she saw my approach. She was my second-in-command, my wing commander. A damn good rider, a longtime friend, and she kept a tight leash on thekya’rassafor me…if I was otherwise distracted.
I looked around the small circle. A rider horde I had handpicked for this brief journey, many of whom I still made uneasy.
